As the definition of the Metaverse continues to be ambiguous, the United States has started to explore the establishment of standards. The aim is to standardize the technologies that will be needed in the future, but what kind of world is envisioned beyond that?
What do Microsoft, Epic Games, Adobe, Nvidia and IKEA have in common? According to the standards nonprofit Khronos Group, it’s the Metaverse.
Despite the lack of a clear definition of what exactly the term Metaverse refers to, many companies are joining forces for Metaverse interoperability. But what exactly are they doing?
You may not have heard of an organization called the Khronos Group before. In a sense, it is an organization that intends to do so.
The non-profit organization and more than 150 contributors are responsible for managing and developing the open standards that underpin the technology in use today. Open standards include OpenGL, Vulkan, and many other tools that make the video games you play run.
“The standards that are really successful are so ubiquitous that you forget they are standards,” explains Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. The group aims to do just that for the standards it develops in areas such as gaming, XR, machine learning and 3D design.
So it makes sense that this group would want to get involved in standardizing the metaverse. But we still don’t know exactly what the Metaverse will look like. Nevertheless, the Khronos Group has announced the formation of a cooperative group called the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF) to help develop tools for the metaverse. MSF is not a new standardization body, but a “collaboration place” for existing standards bodies and companies.
What is the Metaverse anyway?
Tech companies and evangelists say the Metaverse is a futuristic virtual world where people shop, play and socialize.
Have you ever seen the movie “Ready Player One” based on the science fiction novel ? It is often said that the Metaverse is “that world” that appears in the movies. It’s an idea with a strong fantasy flavor, and it’s an interesting story.
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But that’s not all software can do. Someone has to actually build it. “The Metaverse won’t come out like Ready Player One,” says Khronos Group’s Trevett.
As Trevett explains, “Ready Player One” is a constant reference when discussing the Metaverse. “It wasn’t a company that quickly perfected the whole metaverse called OASIS. It was built around the problem of, which is probably not how the metaverse is actually created.”
“We also want to make sure the metaverse is open and inclusive so that it doesn’t become a dystopian world,” says Travett. Apparently, Travett read the original very well.
MSF aims to standardize what Travett calls “connectivity and spatial computing,” the way the real and virtual worlds connect and interact with each other. This includes everything from technologies like digital twins (virtual spaces that mimic real-world industrial environments for research and testing that cannot be done in real life) to, of course, video games.
Whether or not video games like Fortnite are part of the metaverse is a long-running debate. Nonetheless, it is clear that video games will need to be able to handle complex data such as 3D models, animations and physics simulations.
It should be relatively easy to transfer that data from one app to another. Just like simple images are compatible. Since the world of video games is being used for purposes other than games, such efforts are required.
MSF doesn’t define the Metaverse for future prediction, but rather provides the basic tools developers need today. It means leaving the discussion of names and definitions to others.
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What you need to build a virtual world
When designing virtual worlds, especially virtual worlds that are supposed to interact with the real world, you are bound to deal with huge amounts of data. All objects and characters in video games are composed of various data such as geometry data (data representing their shape), texture, physical properties such as weight and mass, behavior, animation, and voice.
The Khronos Group hopes that by establishing a standard at MSF, data will be as easily interoperable as JPEG is today, for example. JPEGs are known to be very easy to transport and are compatible with everything. No amount of encryption can stop someone from right-clicking and saving.
With 3D objects, on the other hand, the software often doesn’t even know up or down. When moving from one game engine to another, data often fails to load properly (assuming it can be imported).
One of Khronos Group’s projects, glTF, is trying to solve this problem. The open standard was published in 2015 and competes with other 3D file formats such as OBJ and FBX.
For example, OBJ is like the old BMP files that Microsoft developed as a device-independent way of displaying image data. It is basically an image file, but its functions are very limited, heavy, and inefficient. On the other hand, FBX seems to be a PSD file of the file format used in “Adobe Photoshop” developed by Adobe. More powerful, but the developer owns the rights.
To continue this very specific analogy, glTF is like JPEG in the 3D world. At least Khronos Group hopes so. The reason the JPEG file format became so important was that it was an open standard, lightweight, and useful enough to be widely adopted.
glTF may become popular as well. Or it could just end up being one of the never-used importable file formats for Blender, the software that lets you create 3D objects. But the need for interoperable standards will not go away, even if only as a check against corporate proprietary.
“If there is a large gap between when a technology becomes available and when the standards that make it widely available are published, there is a danger that proprietary company technology will be incorporated into the Metaverse infrastructure. You wouldn’t want it,” explains Trevett. “But without standards available, we have no choice.”
For the future of the “Metaverse”
Don’t worry if the idea of developing standards for virtual worlds might never come to fruition. You’re not the only one.
The Khronos Group calls it the Metaverse Standards Forum, but says it doesn’t care much about defining the metaverse. Nor do they care about the possibility that the term Metaverse will be used in the future. Khronos Group also explained that it will help build the metaverse, but will not be involved in its future operation.
“The word ‘metaverse’ may be replaced by another word. It doesn’t really matter. It’s kind of like the ‘information superhighway’ it used to be. The word is now almost It’s no longer used,” says Travett. Yes, the term “cyberspace” has fallen out of use, but people still use what the term means, “the Internet.”
Stories of fantasy virtual worlds, no matter how impractical or undesirable, highlight the importance of interoperable, compatible data formats that are not proprietary to the enterprise. It’s more exciting than explaining it in classroom lectures. And in the meantime, a variety of interesting technologies, from virtual filmmaking to photogrammetry to augmented reality, have emerged to change the way people use the internet.
Will these technologies lead to the creation of a metaverse like that seen in Ready Player One? Or will each industry start building something really interesting in its own right, rather than cohesive into one fantasy world? Hard to predict.
Or maybe I’m thinking too hard. No matter what the future holds, someone still has to build it.
